Development

№ 2026-87 · November 2026 · 38 min

Polycrisis Resilience: A General Definition and the H Heuristics Framework

Polycrisis Resilience, a concept developed by Hunter Hughes, is the capacity of individuals, communities, institutions, economies, societies and interconnected systems to anticipate, withstand, adapt to, recover from and reduce vulnerability to multiple interacting crises; the H Heuristics framework builds it through development (the world death rate from natural disasters fell 98% between the 1920s and 2010s; composite capacity averages 22 in low-income and 70 in high-income countries, income explaining 81% of the variation), and a permutation test shows the clustering of weaknesses across 166 countries is almost entirely income.

№ 2026-85 · November 2026 · 26 min

Addressing Interconnected Global Crises Through Coordinated Economic Development

Earlier progress in one system predicts faster later progress in others (9 of 42 pairs significant against 2 by chance, mean standardised coefficient +0.095, stable across four time windows), with water and sanitation, power and income the strongest leading systems and health almost isolated; lopsided development is associated with worse survival in the pandemic (−0.33 standard deviations of life expectancy against trend per standard deviation of imbalance) but not with growth risk or disaster mortality, and water and sanitation is the highest-leverage bottleneck in 47 of 124 countries.

№ 2026-78 · November 2026 · 24 min

Artificial Intelligence as an Accelerator of Global Development

High-income countries, with 17% of the world's people, generate 57% of Claude.ai usage and the five low-income countries with published data 0.2%; income alone explains 80% of usage per capita and English adds nothing, while 1.2 billion people live where doctors are fewest and digital foundations weakest, so the accelerator is not yet pointed at the need.

№ 2026-77 · November 2026 · 26 min

Accelerating the Global Clean Energy Transition

World clean electricity gains about one percentage point a year, against 2.3 needed for a fully clean grid by 2050 and 3.8 by 2040, yet wind and solar additions have grown 19% a year since 2019 and coal, oil and gas use outside power is still rising. Five countries generate two thirds of fossil power, and if every country at least matched the pace of the fastest tenth of its income peers, world power would be about 95% clean by 2050 rather than 65%.

№ 2026-75 · October 2026 · 26 min

The Architecture of Global Technological Diffusion

Infrastructure-embedded technologies took a median of 26.5 years to go from 10% to 50% of US households, five times as long as stand-alone products; today no low-income country has passed 50% internet use, and the poorest trail the rich by 20 to 34 years or more on the technologies that matter most. Income, schooling, institutions, finance, power and place explain 86% of cross-country diffusion, vaccination escapes them, and at equal income each 10 points of diffusion goes with 19% lower child mortality.

№ 2026-72 · October 2026 · 24 min

The Clean Energy Trajectory

Clean sources met all of the growth in world electricity demand in 2025 and solar modules are 95% cheaper than in 2010, yet nearly two billion people still use under a megawatt-hour a year. Against a stalled transition, a 1.5 °C pathway avoids 106 billion person-years of hazardous heat, about 54 million deaths from fossil-fuel air pollution, nearly all energy poverty and $18 trillion of fuel imports by 2050. The binding constraints are finance, grids and institutions, not technology.